FDAS’s Tom Jessop: Ethereum (ETH) Should Be Added to Fidelity’s List or Not

The president of Fidelity, Tom Jessop, talked about adding ETH to their list. Jessop said that the platform was making plans to list ETH. However, the new comments from the president suggest that the platform may not add Ethereum soon. Speaking to cryptocurrency news outlet CoinDesk, on Thursday, he said:

“We’re currently supporting bitcoin, we have designs to support other coins over the balance of the year center to various criteria including our [in-house selection framework], where we obviously look … at client demand and other things,”

What he is trying to say is that the factors that influence their decision to list a given coin are market demand, decentralization, and peculiarities about the blockchain protocol. The market demand is always tightly related to market capitalization. He said that market capitalization will be an attraction for listing coins. However, some coins with high market capitalization will not be listed if they do not meet other criteria. Jessop continued:

“We will probably go in market cap order, that’s where the demand is but it doesn’t mean that we will list every coin. There may be reasons why we [won’t list] a coin that has nothing to do with quite frankly client [demand]. We’d love to have support [for] ether but you know you have a hard fork coming up and some upgrades, so I think we’re trying to see how those things work out before we make a decision to put them on the platform.”

Jessop’s fears are not unfounded. You see Ethereum recently activated the Constantinople upgrade. This upgrade is one out of many other upgrades that will eventually bring the blockchain to its final stage – Serenity. According to the roadmap, the developers will reach this level in 2020 as long as everything goes to plan. These updates will change the blockchain fundamentally. So, in a bid to protect its investors, FDAS has decided to hold off on adding Ethereum for now. He didn’t give a timeline on when they will finally make that decision.

Fidelity Digital Assets And The Digital Asset Market

Fidelity is one of the most popular brands in the financial sector. Its digital assets branch, Fidelity Digital Assets, focuses on digital assets like cryptocurrencies and other virtual currencies. While FDAS is adding cryptocurrencies to its list, it’s president, Tom Jessop, recently said that the company is carefully considering whether ETH should be added or not.

After talking about how the company’s foremost priority is to protect investors, Jessop said that their goal for the rest of the year is to dominate the United States market by at least 90% before the year 2019 comes to an end. They are working on making several improvements and becoming more regulatory compliant. Jessop said that even with the cryptocurrency winter, they believe the market is still robust. In his words:

“Despite crypto winter, the market is still pretty robust and so we’re excited about that. The [goal for the] rest of the year is scaled the business in terms of adding new clients [and] expanding the scope for offering trading execution services … we can we say we’re live [but] it’s also a function honestly of where we have jurisdictional authority to operate.”